Unruly Bodies, Unruly Statistics: Thalidomide and the Birth of Reproductive Epidemiology in the Early 1960s

This chapter interrogates the historical, infrastructural, and epistemic contexts that shaped the establishment of Sweden's Register of Congenital Malformations in 1964. Instituted in response to the global thalidomide catastrophe, the register emerged with a dual mandate: to detect emergent patterns and upticks in congenital malformations, and to act as a sentinel system for fetal damage. Placing the register within the broader international shift toward pharmaceutical oversight and standardized registries, this chapter underscores the situated nature of its creation. It probes into the classification problems posed by congenital malformations, showing how difficult it is to incorporate such anomalies into the dominant grid of medical classification. In a medical world fixated on standardization, key actors such as Bengt Källén devised novel mechanisms to grapple with the elusive nature of congenital malformations. By foregrounding the complex interplay between surveillance, standardization, and the unknown in medical practice, this chapter attends to some of the inherent contradictions in medical knowledge production.

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Lee, Francis. 2024. "Unruly Bodies, Unruly Statistics: Thalidomide and the Birth of Reproductive Epidemiology in the Early 1960s." In Histories of Fetal Knowledge Production in Sweden: Medicine, Politics, and Public Controversy, 1530-2020, edited by Solveig Jülich, 306-328. Leiden: Brill.